Mavericks blows...

Alright, So here's the deal. I have a Macbook Pro 13in Mid-2010

My laptop was running slow as molasses with 10.6.1 Snow Leopard, but I think it was more due to the lack of HD space. Still, battery was pretty good and it would run with many tabs open and all. It didn't bother me as much cause it was like that for a while.

But then...
I cleared some HD space, and installed Mavericks thinking I would get a performance boost. It felt that way for a couple of weeks but now battery life is dismal, apps take forever to open, Safari can't run that many tabs without giving me the stupid *explicit* rainbow wheel and I hate what they did to the Activity Monitor.
What is that with the "Safari Web Contents" for each tab? I liked the one task cause you could kill -9 PID it when it inevitably started hogging 2 gigs of HD space which it always did regardless of what you ran. Also, I can't see my current HD space like before.

So in the end, even though it was free, I wish I hadn't gone for it.
Now I'm thinking of maybe doing a fresh reset and wipe the HD and I guess re-install Mavericks or something. Will that improve my comps performance?

If so, how would I go about it?

It's really annoying considering this computer never blew me away performance wise so these problems just make me not consider Apple for a next computer as much as I'd like to. The iPad (32 gig w/ lightning) has it's slow days too and the iPhone (64 gig 4S)...I've definitely wanted to slam it against a wall more times than I can count. You spend so much on these things and they really don't deliver.

Sorry for the rant at the end but it's a tad frustrating.

So any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

I do not know what the problem is, but this much I can tell you: it's not Mavericks.

I'm running Mavericks on a 2009 MacBook Pro -- older than yours, and less powerful graphically and processor-wise -- and I'm getting great performance out of the machine (I do, however, have 8GB of RAM in this 'book).

There's a lot of possibilities about why your machine isn't performing up to spec, but without a lot of back-and-forth about it in the troubleshooting process I couldn't say. Maybe you don't have much RAM (Mavericks would prefer at least 4GB, more is way better). Maybe you "cleared some space" but didn't clear all that much, or local backups have eaten away at the space you cleared. Many other possibilities.

If one of the issues I just mentioned isn't the problem, and if you're not running that stupid MacKeeper or some dumb "anti-virus" program, and you're up-to-date on your maintenance, I'd say if you have an Apple store nearby schedule an appointment and let a pro take a look. They might spot something obvious (like 100GB of folders and files on the desktop) that would take us a much longer time to discover since we can't see/experience the machine(s).

As regards the iPad, the only time I've ever seen a modern (Lightning) iPad get slow is when its nearly full. Likewise an iPhone.

Since you said even before Mavericks with Snow Leopard installed it was never very fast, I wonder if there is another issue like bad hard drive? Are you saying out of the Box it was always slow to you?

Also how much RAM do you have installed?


Also even my iPad First Generation is not what I consider Slow nor my oldish iPhone 3GS.

I'm also going to say that it's not Mavericks.

Could be:

- a failing HD
- not enough ram
- not rebooting enough (swap file and page outs getting too large)
- asking the computer to do too much (too many apps open)
- not enough free space on the HD
- etc.

I'm afraid that you've come to the faulty conclusion my friend. Mavericks does not "blow"!

- Nick

Did you do an upgrade or a fresh install? Upgrades, at least in my experience, tend to get quite slow quite quickly.

chas_m said:

I do not know what the problem is, but this much I can tell you: it's not Mavericks.

I'm running Mavericks on a 2009 MacBook Pro -- older than yours, and less powerful graphically and processor-wise -- and I'm getting great performance out of the machine (I do, however, have 8GB of RAM in this 'book).

There's a lot of possibilities about why your machine isn't performing up to spec, but without a lot of back-and-forth about it in the troubleshooting process I couldn't say. Maybe you don't have much RAM (Mavericks would prefer at least 4GB, more is way better). Maybe you "cleared some space" but didn't clear all that much, or local backups have eaten away at the space you cleared. Many other possibilities.

If one of the issues I just mentioned isn't the problem, and if you're not running that stupid MacKeeper or some dumb "anti-virus" program, and you're up-to-date on your maintenance, I'd say if you have an Apple store nearby schedule an appointment and let a pro take a look. They might spot something obvious (like 100GB of folders and files on the desktop) that would take us a much longer time to discover since we can't see/experience the machine(s).

As regards the iPad, the only time I've ever seen a modern (Lightning) iPad get slow is when its nearly full. Likewise an iPhone.

Click to expand...

Nah, I've avoided those programs lol.

I try to keep my desktop with less than 1 or 2 GB for that reason.

dtravis7 said:

Since you said even before Mavericks with Snow Leopard installed it was never very fast, I wonder if there is another issue like bad hard drive? Are you saying out of the Box it was always slow to you?

Also how much RAM do you have installed?


Also even my iPad First Generation is not what I consider Slow nor my oldish iPhone 3GS.

Click to expand...

I had a Core 2 Duo Windows HP for a few years before I got the Mac in 2010 so I was never blown away when I got it and the Rainbow wheels were present since a few months of ownership, maybe before.
On a side note, I was disappointed that the Mac was twice as much $ and the hardware was like 3 years old. 6 months later they upgraded them :/

I installed 6GB about 2 years ago to try to help with the performance but it usually has about 3GB free.

Yeah, I had a 3G and I never found it to be slow like that. The 4S wasn't always slow. I've ran it down to zero memory and it still felt a bit quicker than how it's been lately. True, it's still running iOS 5.0.1 but that shouldn't affect it at this point.
I'm contemplating going to iOS 7.0 but I hear the performance suffers after a while too so I'm not sure.

pigoo3 said:

I'm also going to say that it's not Mavericks.

Could be:

- a failing HD
- not enough ram
- not rebooting enough (swap file and page outs getting too large)
- asking the computer to do too much (too many apps open)
- not enough free space on the HD
- etc.

I'm afraid that you've come to the faulty conclusion my friend. Mavericks does not "blow"!

- Nick

Click to expand...

I've had to force shut it down a few times cause it just freezes. One thing I noticed this OS does is re-open everything that was previously open (something the iMac 2011 at my house with Mountain Lion does and I didn't like) so you can't do a fresh restart, essentially. Is there a way to shutter that?

Haha, it would appear it doesn't. I figured it doesn't since many people seem to like it but it was the latest change so it gets the blame.

vansmith said:

Did you do an upgrade or a fresh install? Upgrades, at least in my experience, tend to get quite slow quite quickly.

Click to expand...

I just upgraded it, didn't do a fresh install when going to Mavericks. I read of some problems people had doing it fresh with Mavericks plus it was more convenient to upgrade.




Thanks for the help so far.
So...

I've heard the hard drive one before when I asked on here about going to Mavericks to help performance. Could the hard drive operate fine but still be faulty?

So should I go have it checked (I had all the Apple Care and stuff but I'm sure it's long expired) or try a fresh install first? Or just shotgun for a new HD...maybe SSD if its sure to help?
I'm trying to remember. I think I took it in once to have it checked for performance but nothing came of it.

If the HD was the culprit, would changing it potentially improve speed and battery life?
I'm losing over 15% battery on sleep in less than a day. And use now gives me about 3. Before the upgrade I would still see it climb to 8 hours occasionally when I wasn't running too much stuff.

Awesomesauce said:

I've had to force shut it down a few times cause it just freezes. One thing I noticed this OS does is re-open everything that was previously open (something the iMac 2011 at my house with Mountain Lion does and I didn't like) so you can't do a fresh restart, essentially.

Click to expand...

Earlier OS versions did this as well.

Awesomesauce said:

Is there a way to shutter that?

Click to expand...

There sure is. When you Restart or Shutdown the computer...a dialog window pops up. Within that window there is a check box...with the statement "Reopen windows when logging back in."

Make sure that this box is de-selected if you do not want this to occur.

- Nick

Nick is correct. Also the first OSX I remember having that option to re-open all running apps at startup was 10.7 Lion. 10.6 did not have that option. It's nice if you want to resume where you left off but can lengthen boot up time to a useable desktop.

I have an '09 MBP with 4gigs of ram, running mavericks from an upgrade. It runs efficiently as ever. No lags.

Sounds like he is running out of swap space on his HDD.. If he doesn't have 10-20GB of free space for swap he is going to run into beach ball (colorful swirly mouse pointer) issues..

But he did state he was having issues before mavericks. So /rolleyes not sure how the OS became the assailant of this catastrophe.


So if I may offer some constructive advice. 1)Clean out as many unused files or get an external storage. 2) Backup your data, and 3)Run some hardware diagnostics software. To me it sounds like a tossup between the HDD and the CPU.. Sounds like one or the other has got to hot at some point..

My 09 MBP with 8GB of ram and 500GB HD runs 10.9.1 faster and better than any previous OS.

pigoo3 said:

Earlier OS versions did this as well.



There sure is. When you Restart or Shutdown the computer...a dialog window pops up. Within that window there is a check box...with the statement "Reopen windows when logging back in."

Make sure that this box is de-selected if you do not want this to occur.

- Nick

Click to expand...

Sweet. I'll definitely give that a shot. Thanks.

dtravis7 said:

Nick is correct. Also the first OSX I remember having that option to re-open all running apps at startup was 10.7 Lion. 10.6 did not have that option. It's nice if you want to resume where you left off but can lengthen boot up time to a useable desktop.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I see the logic behind and certainly would like it if the comp could handle it lol.

Exodist said:

Sounds like he is running out of swap space on his HDD.. If he doesn't have 10-20GB of free space for swap he is going to run into beach ball (colorful swirly mouse pointer) issues..

But he did state he was having issues before mavericks. So /rolleyes not sure how the OS became the assailant of this catastrophe.


So if I may offer some constructive advice. 1)Clean out as many unused files or get an external storage. 2) Backup your data, and 3)Run some hardware diagnostics software. To me it sounds like a tossup between the HDD and the CPU.. Sounds like one or the other has got to hot at some point..

Click to expand...

I have gotten the "Not enough swap space" thing before but it was prior to the upgrade and I was running a lot of things without shutting down for a while.

The beach ball (had no clue that's what they called it, I just called it the rainbow wheel of death) would still show up when the computer was fairly new. Honestly, I came to think that Mac's were like that lol.

The only reason I gave blame to the new OS was that the computer got worse.

I did get a new external HD after the last one decided to not be recognized by Time Machine or the Mac. I did a back-up and deleted quite a bit of stuff.

I wouldn't be surprised if something got too hot as this thing has gotten quite hot before.

Any recommendations on hardware diagnostics software? Something free I'd hope.



Thanks!